Once
you've read these basic rules, you should move on to our practical
tutorials.

This
page will offer some basic knowledge about Reel DVD and Photoshop
that will be necessary to produce Motion Menus. These items will
be referred to later in our tutorials.

1.How
an Overlay Works:A
Motion Menu is made up of two source files. The video stream,
your motion background, and the overlay, the file that will actually
become your buttons. You will import them both into Reel, video
first, then the overlay on top. The pics below demonstrate how
Reel treats these files. The pic to the left is the source file
from my NLE (editing program.) The pic to the far right is the
overlay file I created in Photoshop. The center shows how Reel
merges, or layers, the two together.

Notice
how the video does have a few still images... title etc. If
there will be any still images on your menu that will not be
involved with the interactivity of the menu, I recommend you
render them within your background video. The following example
does show text in the overlay that will not be "highlighted."
It is generally best to render these items with the video. When
rendered with the video, many effects are available to you,
but not when used within an overlay for ReelDVD. Overlays have
numerous limitations that will be discussed below.

The
checkerboard pattern in the still overlay is used by Photoshop
to denote a transparent background. When it is imported into
Reel, Reel recognizes the background as white. Reel reads
all pure white as transparent by default. This may seem redundant
to mention, since it all ends up transparent, but it will
be important to know later.

2.
Acceptable
Colors in overlays.Reel
will recognize only four colors in a motion menu overlay. If any
item in your overlay is not made up of one of these pure colors,
Reel will not display it. The following colors are acceptable:

Pure
White
(255,255,255)

Pure
Black
(0,0,0)

Pure
Blue
(0,0,255)

Pure
Red
(255,0,0)

It
is unimportant if these are not the colors you'd like
to see in your final menu. These are simply the base colors
Reel will recognize. They can be adjusted once overlayed
in ReelDVD.

The
numbers in parentheses, i.e. (0,0,255), refer to the RGB
standard, or Red, Green, Blue. These can be easily selected
in Photoshop using the Color Picker shown to the right.

Double
click on the color swatch within the toolbar (highlighted
area to the left. This loads the Color Picker window.
Change the RGB values in the fields to the right of the
color palette window to select the pure colors as the
foreground, or working color.

Need
more detailed training?

3.Aligning your overlay.To
be sure all of your "highlights," areas that change
color when selected in your menu, overlay properly on your video
background, start with a screen shot of your motion video background.
It is best to use an image exported from ReelDVD to ensure that
your video and overlay will be properly aligned. To do this, select
the video within Reel that will have the overlay so it appears
in the preview window. Go to FILE>EXPORT VIDEO IMAGE AS...

Import
your screen shot into Photoshop.

Add
a new layer onto the image using the layer palette shown
to the right. ( If you Photoshop will not allow you to
do this, you must go to "Save As" and save the
file as a .psd. This is Photoshop's format, and also the
format that ReelDVD identifies the best.)

Draw
or type your highlights on top of this screen shot.

When
done drawing, remove the visibility of the screen shot
background by deselecting the eye next to the "background"
layer. Save your image as a new .psd file. If a
layer is marked not visible when it is saved, ReelDVD
will not see it. Don't delete the layer, as you may want
to return later to adjust highlights. You can do so by
opening the saved .psd file in Photoshop and clicking
on where the eye would be in the layers panel again to
make it visible once more.

Note:
If
including text in your overlay, be sure to TURN OFF Anti-aliasing
on your new type layers. Anti-aliasing smooths the edges
of text by blurring and blending them slightly. This will
create very jagged edges when the .psd file is imported
into Reel. Reel will automatically convert all imported
files into a .bmp file. Bitmaps (.bmp) do not support anti-aliasing.
To do this: Choose Layer > Type> Anti-Alias None